Completed: The Last Lovely City

Dear Jenny,

Oh, crap. I finished this book in early March and, for some reason, was certain that I had written about it. Alas... nothing. Not even a "Jot-some-stuff-down" Draft post in here. And the reason I say, "Oh, crap" about this is because... I remember absolutely nothing about this book.

Except for the thing I already told you about in a comment, which is that I got halfway through it and found a dog-eared page which means that I had read that far before and remembered absolutely nothing.

That makes twice now that I have read this book and don't remember a thing about it. Oof.

So. It's a collection of short stories, as one GoodReads reviewer puts it: "Mostly uninteresting relationship stories." I would say that's harsh but... I guess they weren't that interesting, since I remember nothing about them. I mean, I've read several books since I finished this one, but still. A black hole, Jennifer. There is just a blank space in my brain in the shape of this book.

Let me flip through and see if I can find some notes or something in here...

Oh, yeah! It is weirdly divided into two parts. "Part 1" is the first 2/3 and consists of short stories with no connection to one another. "Part 2" is a sort of "novella" of four related stories written from different people's viewpoints. So that was odd. And, even though I don't remember that final novella, I do remember thinking, "Finally! This got interesting!" so I guess I was into that story, at least a little.  But even now... I can barely remember it, either.

It was published shortly before Adams's death, so perhaps she just wanted to get it done. If that's the case, this weird format makes sense.

You know... I just scanned the pages, thinking, "Well, I'll pull out some stuff here to talk about..." and then I decided: "No. No, I won't." Cause, what's the point?

And then I thought, "Oh, wait -- there was that one story with a twist at the end!" and then I realized, "Nope. That was from February's book, The Imperfectionists."

So. There's that.

This might be the biggest cop-out post I have done on this here blog, but I feel somewhat justified. Why work hard to dredge my memory for something that was not memorable?

So let's move on to On Beauty, because that book has lots to talk about!

love,
kelly